January 27, 2012

After I got out of the service in June 1956 I attended college beginning in the fall. From that point on I spent forty years in the world of Academe as both student and teacher. One of the worst parts of teaching was the meetings one had to attend. At a certain point in my career as a professor my English department was passing around the duty of taking notes at meetings. When it was my turn, in order to get through the ordeal with a minimum of frustration and annoyance I wrote,

THE DEPARTMENT MINUTES BLUES

The Chairman called the assembled folk to order.

He rapped and called the faculty to order

At 4:19 with a poet as recorder.

Moved and seconded minutes be accepted

For the last meeting; nothing was excepted.

So they were, and the agenda was adopted.

The committee chairs rose to give reports:

None from Composition...no reports

From the Comp. Committee, and no retorts.

Curriculum rose to say that they'd been moved --

Professor M. said Curriculum had been moved

By the Chair's "Priorities," which they approved.

Professor A. said Merit and Promotion

Had published its report and had no motion

To propose just now, nor other notion.

Retention and Recruitment had one, however.

If it were passed, the Committee would endeavor

To stop automatic serial appointments forever.

The motion was debated and the debate was fast;

Words pro and con were exchanged thick and fast,

And then by a vote of 13-7 it passed.

Professor O continued: the Committee had voted

(On B's rejecting our offer, be it noted),

That Z be proffered the Shakespeare slot we'd quoted

In national ads. Professor L. reported

On what President W. had reported

About the Restoration of Funds and assorted

News from Fac. Assem., including a plea

-- A heartfelt request and a soulful plea

That the faculty at large volunteer and agree

To be evaluated by students who wished

Then to have the results of the poll published

So other students could select the classes they wished

With some degree of awareness.

On to business

Held over and over -- on to Old Business,

A subject that has been the cause of dizziness

In some faculty for at least four sessions,

If not for years and years of fruitless sessions:

The nine-hour load. We have not learned our lessons,

Professor K suggested, but the solution

Or, if not the whole, then a partial solution,

Was in hand. He moved this resolution:

"Be it resolved that we of the English faculty declare that teaching three three-hour classes, one of which (not a composition or a writing arts class) has an upper limit of 50 students, is an optional normal, or regular, teaching assignment."

The debate was hot and heavy, heavy and hot,

The afternoon was cool, but the debate was hot.

Professor T. blew up -- when does he not?

The debate went on and on, but ended at last;

The clock ticked on relentlessly, and then at last

A vote was taken; the resolution passed.

When the dust had settled, there were eleven --

Not twelve Apostles, but a mere Eleven

In favor, while against there stood the Seven.

The Graduate Committee proposed a plan

To revive the M. A. Program, a solid plan

To bring it back to life. Debate began,

But time ran out with Professor M. hacking it

To little pieces...while he was hacking it

To shreds at length instead of backing it.

And so there was a motion to adjourn.

It passed, and the Department did adjourn,

But no doubt this sore subject will return.

A friend who recently read the poem wrote me, “Ah, this is so funny. And we could read it across the country (with few changes) and each department would see itself."

January 23, 2012

Lewis Putnam Turco’s book titled Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1697, winner of the Wild Card category of the 2009 New England Book Festival, has just been issued in a 2012 e-book Kindle edition, SatansScourge-ebook/1 by its publisher, www.StarCloudPress.com, of Scottsdale, Arizona. The price is $8.79 which includes free wireless delivery.

January 19, 2012

Last evening, Wednesday, January 18, 2012, very belatedly I learned of the death of Herbert R. Coursen, Jr., whom I met forty-four years ago here in Maine, at a 1968 Bowdoin College conference on “stylistics.” It was the same year that the first edition of my volume titled The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics was published — Herb would become one of its first and biggest fans.

Herb died at the age of 79 in bed, in his sleep apparently and enviably, on Saturday, December 3rd, 2011. I hope that he had received and seen his contributor’s copy of the revised and expanded edition of The Book of Forms, Including Odd and Invented Forms, which included four of his poems, “National Pastime,” in my opinion the greatest poem about baseball ever written; “The King of Kolchis,” written in a form he invented called the “once” (pronounced “on-say”), “St. John of the Cross,” written in the Spanish form called the “lira,” invented by the title poet, and “Winter Dreams,” written in another form Coursen invented, the dagwood.

On more than one occasion I have written about Herb: I penned the "Introduction" to his book of poems titled Hope Farm (Stratford CT: Cider Mill Press, 1979), and I wrote a lead essay, "The Protean Poetry of Herbert Coursen," published in The Hollins Critic, xxxii:3, June 1995, pp. 1-11.

Herb was a dear old friend, as was Pamela Mount, his companion of two decades, who died last year. My wife Jean and I miss them deeply. I will post “The Protean Poetry of Herbert Coursen” on my blog titled “Odd and Invented Forms” today.

January 13, 2012

My old friend, the poet X. J. Kennedy, and I have been discussing typographical errors lately — these are our stories:

Dear Lew,

As you and I well know by now, no matter how careful the proofreading, some godam snafus will always slip through. Last year Johns Hopkins brought out a translation I'd done (Apollinaire's Bestiary), containing the original French, and although I'd gone over it six times, Catharine Brosman to my chagrin detected five errors in the French! But the worst fuckup I ever made was scrambling eight lines of Milton's "Lycidas" in a textbook — scrambled, they still seemed to make good sense. The scramble lasted in the textbook through three editions till some UChicago prof called me on the carpet for it. Which shows, maybe, how many people ever taught "Lycidas"!

Love,

Joe

Dear Joe,

Your story is bad and sad, but I committed a horrendous typo that I didn't get a chance to correct for thirty-seven years! —

In 1970 my book of prose poems titled The Inhabitant was published, and I was giving my first reading from it at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. As I recall, I was sitting on a table at the front of the room reading the penultimate stanza of the poem which was titled,

The Inhabitant stands in his hallway. A long way from the door, still the gentleman has a distance to go before he can leave, or enter, or simply resume.

Here there is small illumination. The only window is of squares of stained glass, in the door behind him which is closed.

Things wait in the narrow aisle. Objects beguile him — each has its significance, in and beyond itself; each is an obstacle in a way to be touched and passed:

Touched and repassed, and with each touching to become more than the original substance. The Inhabitant stands in his hallway, curiosities looming ahead and behind.

It is as though, almost, this furniture had become organs, extensions of his body. If he listens, the gentleman may find his pulse booming in the hallseat, under the lid, gently, among artifacts and mathoms.

Let him proceed; let his footfall say clum, silence, clum. Let the stained light lie amber on a black umbrella in its stand, fall scarlet on the carpet, make a blue haze of a gray hatbrim rising in shadow to the level of his eye to rest on an iron antler in the hall.

The Inhabitant is home. Let him go down the hallway, choosing to pass the stair and banister this time, pass these things of his, levelly, moving from light to light, shadow to shadow.

Before I’d written the poem I had run across the obsolete English word “clum” in one of my favorite books, Lost Beauties of the English Language by Charles MacKay. According to MacKay, “clum” was once a synonym for “silence,” which I thought was fascinating, because the word itself didn’t sound silent. However, I thought that “clum, silence, clum” was a great way to conjure the sonic image of a person walking down the hallway of an old house.

So I sat on that table at Saranac Lake reading the poem aloud to a small audience when my performance came to a jolting halt. I gasped, indicating my distress in various other ways as well: turning red in the face, going rigid…because I had discovered a typographical error that neither I nor my editors had caught — instead of “footfall,” the first line of the next-to-last stanza read, “Let him proceed; let his football say clum, silence, clum.” It was a humbling, and humiliating, experience.

The Virginia Quarterly Review"The Mutable Past," a memoir collected in FANTASEERS, A BOOK OF MEMORIES by Lewis Turco of growing up in the 1950s in Meriden, Connecticut, (Scotsdale AZ: Star Cloud Press, 2005).

The Tower JournalTwo short stories, "The Demon in the Tree" and "The Substitute Wife," in the spring 2009 issue of Tower Journal.

The Tower JournalMemoir, “Pookah, The Greatest Cat in the History of the World,” Spring-Summer 2010.

The Michigan Quarterly ReviewThis is the first terzanelle ever published, in "The Michigan Quarterly Review" in 1965. It has been gathered in THE COLLECTED LYRICS OF LEWIS TURCO/WESLI COURT, 1953-2004 (www.StarCloudPress.com).

The Gawain PoetAn essay on the putative medieval author of "Gawain and the Green Knight" in the summer 2010 issue of Per Contra.